[m a d r a]

well, here's the story so far.......

sat 29th.

[release day] i go to PCworld [UK equiv of compUSA ie. big but useless for anything 'mac'] and ask about X,1...

"we don't have it. we have no plans to get it. why don't you order it from apple's website?"

mon 1st. i ring round 2 or 3 apple resellers in manchester...

"no. we don't have it. dunno when we're going to get it. you can order it off apple's website..."

"we've got some copies but we're not selling them coz we've only got enough to upgrade our display machines..."

"why don't you download it off apple's website?"

etc. etc.

wed 3rd- today

ring applecentre in warrington [about 20 odd miles away]. hurray! they've got 10,1 in and yes, they've got a big box full so it's worth doing the trip.

a quick sprint down the motorway in the torrential rain and i get my sticky paws on X,1 and rush home to install...

zzzzzzz...... is this installer on mogadon or what? and why do they put that "xxx minutes remaining" text on the progress bar? they might as well just code a random number generator on there.... '30mins remaining' ... 2minutes later... "6 mins remaining"... 25 minutes later... "49 mins remaining" etc etc. and when it gets to "under a minute remaining" you really wish you'd brought a book along.

anyway, eventually it's installed and i fire her up....

scrub through a menu... is it faster? is it the same? who knows? not much difference in my eyes.

resize a few finder windows.... ditto

o well, down to the basic chores......

create the fstab file and set the second partition to mount at startup.
edit rc to put the vmswapfile on the second partition.
point netinfo manager to my users folders which are on another partition too.

all this exactly as under X,0,4 where it all ran perfectly.

restart....

aaargh!!!... X,1 has overwritten my users folders with new default ones. luckily i'd renamed my 'documents' folder or i'd have lost all my work. as it is i've lost all my prefs, serialization data, mail etc.

spend ages resetting all prefs, reserializing apps, dowmloading 1500+ emails again and then i notice.....

where the f**k has my "burn to CD" folder gone? a folder full of downloads, work, documents etc which i back up when it hits 650MB. completely gone!

don't panic mate. it has probably been made invisible or something by some freak of the installation....

use tinker tool to show invisibles... no...

boot back into classic. and run norton... not a f**kin sausage. [in monty python voice] it is an ex-folder. it has ceased to be...

getting very pissed off now....

boot back into X....

starts from 9,2 again... WTF?!!!

restart.... hold down option....

only classic shows up...

have to reinstall X,1 and set it all up again. at least this time it doesn't overwrite my user folders.

launch classic....

"classic can't launch because it needs mac os 9,1 or above...." WTF???!!!!

change startup disc to 'classic'... restart...

boots into 9,2 without a hitch.... wot's goin on???

restart... hold down option.... no X startup disc.....

start headbutting wall....

boot into 9,2... change startup disc to 'X'... restart....

boots into X,1 without a hitch....


following this i suffered a series of random glitches an ludicrous behaviours...

login 'shaking its head' when i entered my password and not letting me in... then after a restart the same password works fine...

holding option at startup only shows the current system as a startup option. have to change startup disc via the control panel each time...

classic refusing to run coz 9,1 'isn't installed.... have to bless the system folder each time.

finally i decided i'd have to start from scratch before i went insane, so i backed up my hard drive to a heap of CDs, repartitioned the drive...

[remind me sometime to tell yous what a twat disc utility is]

...reformatted the drive and reinstalled X then X,1 and 9,1 then 9,2....

and am presently reinstalling all my software and reconfiguring everything yet again.

when i was copying files back from the backup CDs i noticed a few more things that i knew for sure had been on the hard disc weren't on the CDs. gone the way of the elusive "burn to CD" folder.

so far then, upgrading to X,1 has cost me about 5 days of my time, a few quid in petrol, 8CDroms, handfuls of hair, some irreplacable documents, a lot of internet downloads and most of what remains of my sanity.

not exactly free then was it?

and the result....

well my reformatted, repartitioned installation seems to be OK so far [2 days on] but i don't think i've seen enough of an improvement over X,0,4 to justify the sh*te i've had to go through to get here.

..and 'option' at startup still doesn't work

has anyone else had any gyp with this upgrade or have i been singled out by the e-gods for special treatment?

[ 10-10-2001: Message edited by: m a d r a ]

[Hash]

i had absolutely smooth upgrade to 10.1-nothing was lost, no data, i had not to re-input anything. My sympathies for u, but i really dont understand how u could have such troubles. Immediately after upgrading to 10.1 which took about 20 minutes on my G3 350 with 448 MB i installed 9.2.1 and again had absolutely no problems-although i expected some. After trying MS word test drive which i donwloaded before and Apple Works 6.2.1 I was amazed by the speed and stability of both applications. Everything is really faster. I feel like my 3 year old G3 became brand new-so fast it is now. Classic already was fast-now i got 10.1 with very good speed. Only in IE sometimes live window resizing is a bit slow but i noticed that this is mainly for first time and next resizing is really much fast.

[sheer]

Single out m8

And this line is just priceless: "we've got some copies but we're not selling them coz we've only got enough to upgrade our display machines..."

[mindwaves]

Here is my story:

Call on Friday the day before X.1 is supposed to be relesased. Answer, yes we will have it.

saturday- I go with some other people and the bookstore here says that it hasn't shipped it to us yet and I look at their display machines and all of them are running X.1

Call them every day for 1.5 weeks with the bookstore saying yes apple has shipped them or apple hasnt shipped them yet or we will be receiving the retail versions before the upgrades.

Monday (10/8)-Since I was frustrated, I go take 2 buses and finally get OS X.1 from a far away place where I live. I install and it seemed to installed itself twice (wasnt sure because I wasnt paying too much attention to it installing). After installation, it didnt recoginze my ethernet connection and I spent 10 mins trying to find out why, but finally it did so now I am set (sort of-my display doesnt sleep properly now )

[ 10-10-2001: Message edited by: mindwaves ]

[Spheric Harlot]

two questions, madra:

1. what were you running before you installed 10.1? A developers' preview?

2. did you reformat or at least fsck -y the disk prior to installing OS X 10.1?

If 2. is "no", then it sounds like your directory was corrupted. That would explain most of the problems you were having.

?

-c.

[theolein]

Hallo Spheric, long time no see. Did you go out and buy 10.1 or did a ship smuggle it into the harbour in Hamburg?

Madra, bad story mate. I'm kind of glad I haven't got my 10.1 yet as it does seem that it has a number of quirks. This whole story of 10.1 accessability is a real joke and has put a lot of people into a bad bad mood.

[Nonsuch]

Just to be safe, I did a clean re-install: backed everything up, reformatted, reinstalled 10.0, then installed 10.1.

No problems at all. The UI is definitely faster, though not without room for further improvement, and the Finder and Dock improvements make the system a lot more flexible. No unexpected surprises came up: my PPPoE connection is fine, I had no trouble importing my email, and I don't believe I've yet had a single crash of an X app.

My only beef is with Classic ... I could swear it's actually a little less quick and stable than it was before. It doesn't help that Dreamweaver seem to have a particular aversion to running in Classic anyway, but I suppose for the interim solution it is, it's fine.

IOW, I'm pretty happy with it.

[Nile Crocodile]

OS X is too much work. I have to reformat for 0.1 upgrade/update? Man sakes alive.

[Arty50]

Thank God I partitioned the HD on my rev. A iMac or my experience would have been disastrous.

So I'm sitting on the hood of my truck parked right in front of CompUSA at 8:15 in the morning. Whooohooo, I was the first one there. So after reading the paper and making sure I was the first one in the door, I pick up the updater and drive home at breakneck speed.

Update 9.1 to 9.2: No problem

Update 10.0.4 to 10.1: Installing...installing...sweet...installing...2 minutes left....We're sorry, an error occurred, please restart your machine. Nooooooo!!!!

So then I restart only to find out that the installation error has taken 10.0.4 along with it. So I proceed to wipe the drive, reinstall everything (9.1, 9.2.1, 10.0.4.) and try 10.1 again. Same result. Third time's a charm? Nope. So in my utter frustration I'm staring at the disc and turn it over only to notice that there's a splotch of paint on it. Great. So I scratch it off gently, reinstall everything again, and receive the same error. Ahhhhh!. The next day I go to the record store I used to work at and have them resurface the cd so that it will read properly. Nope.

By this time I'm stressing really hard. Is it a bad disc? Could it be my GameWizard that's messing everything up? Or maybe the 512M of RAM?

Well I call around to find a new disc (yeah right, good luck), and much to my surprise the CompUSA in South San Jose has it. So I jump in my truck and drive from the Cupertino area all the way down there.

"We had some this morning but we're all out now (3:30pm)."

"But I just called 15-20 minutes ago."

Grrrrrr.

So I go to the Company Store on Monday, grab a copy, and it works perfectly.

Oh, my poor, aching hard drive.

[m a d r a]

1. what were you running before you installed 10.1? A developers' preview?

2. did you reformat or at least fsck -y the disk prior to installing OS X 10.1?

If 2. is "no", then it sounds like your directory was corrupted. That would explain most of the problems you were having.

1. no. i was running the official 10,0,4

2. no. but i ran disc utility before installing and it said everything was sweet. plus. doesn't the installer do disc checks too?

corrupt directory- that's what i thought too. esp. with the disappearing folders etc. however, the drive was running perfectly before i upgraded so if there was directory damage it must have been caused by the upgrade. [which doesn't sound too good]

[BuonRotto]

Everything bad happens to madra. I thought we already agreed that Apple explicitly sabotages your hardware and software.

[Nonsuch]

Originally posted by Nile Crocodile:
<STRONG>OS X is too much work. I have to reformat for 0.1 upgrade/update? Man sakes alive.</STRONG>

No, you don't have to. I did it just for cleanliness' sake.

[m a d r a]

Everything bad happens to madra. I thought we already agreed that Apple explicitly sabotages your hardware and software.

hmmm... in that case i think i've got grounds for a lawsuit. you will be a character witness i trust?

[MacProwler]

FWIW... I ordered a full install copy of 10.1 (couldn't stand the thought of jumping thru hoops for the updater...and wanted the Dev CD..) Got it Monday. I had previously upgraded both my TiBook 450 and dual 500 G4 tower to 9.2.1, so, with no preparation at all, I updated 'em both from 10.0.4 to 10.1. No trouble at all, all my settings, locations, dat, everything... works fine. 10.1 rocks, 'course there's room for improvement... but it's a real OS now. I've been running X since the PB, have all sorts of crazy apps/docklings/utilities etc. I haven't done a clean install since 10.0, just ran the updaters. One thing I haven't done is mess w/ the UNIX guts, but I've never had a problem upgrading.... Yet ;-)

Charlie

[gunnar]

A reply to the guy above with the iMac and losing everything. I doubt that the CD was at fault. I had the same problem with my iMac DV400 Graphite. Exactly the same as it sounds. I can confirm the CD was fine too because I upgraded my TiBook 10 minutes earlier with no problems. Luckily I had an external FireWire drive to back up the iMac and wipe the drive.

[MacProwler]

(Double post... oops...)

[ 10-10-2001: Message edited by: bliff ]

[BuonRotto]

[Arty50]

Thanks, but it was definitely the cd. I tried the first one at least four or five times (to see if it was a fluke or some random error) and got the exact same error every single time. The new cd worked perfectly on the first try.

One thing I learned working in the record store is that bad cds are a fact of life. The error rate on a single run is generally unnoticable, but every now and then we got back a truly bad disc. They would look absolutely perfect but wouldn't play in any machine. Or sometimes they would have bad spots in them. We'd maybe get one or two of those every month; just a guess. In the case of the Cure's "Bloodflowers" the entire first run of the cd was recalled. From what I recall, either the label was painted on upside down or the paint has leaked all over the music side of the disc. In any case they were all messed up.

[ 10-10-2001: Message edited by: Arty50 ]

[m a d r a]

One thing I haven't done is mess with the UNIX guts

i'd prefer not to have to but unfortunately apple's installer is very inflexible in that it installs everything on the same startup partition.

from the reading up i've been doing the 'recommended' way to do it seems to be..to partition your drive to keep system, user, and VM files apart.

[in fact the unix unleashed book suggests seperate partitions for spool files, mail etc. as well, but that sounds like overkill on a single user system to me]

so i've partitioned my 20GB as follows ...

first partition 7GB: X system, classic system and apps
2nd partition 11GB users folders
3rd partition 1,5GB scratch disc for VM

which should make things more efficient by...

a. keeping my users files away from the system and apps
b. giving VM its own space so it doesn't get fragmented

unfortch, to do it this way means 'messing' with the UNIX guts. mind you, it's not too hefty a job. moving users can be done with netinfo manager and changing the location of the VMswapfile is a case of pasting a line of terminal output into a newly created 'fstab' file and changing a line in the rc file to point to the new swap partition.

[at least that's how i did it after perusing a few tutorials and discussions on the web. no doubt some unix geek will step in at this point and tell me how i've just undermined the stability of the western world by doing it this way. ]

[Toyin]

Originally posted by m a d r a:
<STRONG>

1. no. i was running the official 10,0,4

</STRONG>

You mentioned that the swap file was on another drive as were your users. This is not an official 10.0.4 install. I remember upgrading form 10.0.3 to 10.0.4 and forgot that I had moved my swap file. I got a poor performance and a ton of errors. This was fixed with a clean install.

I don't think you should expect Apple to come up with an installer that is going to work with a heavily modified installation.

I did a clean install of 10.1 over 10.04 and have had no problems post installation.

[parsec]

Trying to install 10.1 has been a hell of a time for me as well. Actually, the worst part was finally getting an upgrade cd, and then having it not work for me. I tried upgrading from the 10.0.4 system I had before, and all seemed to go smoothly. Upon rebooting, however, it logged me in automatically as usual, then quickly went to a blank blue screen. The cursor cycled between an arrow and the beach ball, eventually staying as an arrow until I tried clicking somewhere and then moving to a beachball for a little while. Leaving it be for 10 minutes or more didn't help.
So I tried doing a clean install of 10.0, followed by the 10.1 upgrade. Had the same trouble.
10.0.4 never really gave me much grief..
I'm on a beige G3 (233 mhz) with 320 megs of ram.
Has anybody else seen this? Any idea on what I could try to do to fix it?

Thanks,

-p

[Visnaut]

parsec, try pulling out all your third party RAM. I know it sounds wierd, but I had the same problem as you on a G4 400 with 512MBs of ram (4 128MB DIMMS).

Random crashes and errors during installation. The installation log that you can access from the File, or Window menu in the installer, always reported problems with pax and other miscellaneous unix stuff. I tried every other alternative (musta zapped my PRAM and reformated my HD 20 times that weekend) until I pulled out all non-apple RAM... lo and behold it worked! I then put my DIMMs in one by one to see which one X didn't like (sorta like extension troubleshooting).

Its wierd, because i used that DIMM for months in OS9.1, with no problems! And it was very stable, barely ever crashed. Had even applied the Firmware Update that Apple had made available shortly before release. Oh well, at least I'm truly enjoying all this X goodness now, never had to reboot into 9 since! And my brother (who gave me the "bad" DIMM) offered to replace it soon, maybe even w/ a 256 one this time. So it's all good!

[Edit: sorry parsec, i misread your post, i thought your problems were DURING installation. For anyone who's never installed X on their system before and are having problems the first time around tho, this should be good advice]

[ 10-11-2001: Message edited by: Visnaut ]

[darcybaston]

I always do the Classic updates before any OS X updates, as the manual recommends. And if Classic is necessary, always installed the classic OS before the X install. Never a problem...ever.

Updated firmware. Never a firmware update problem ever.

So I already had the 9.2.1 and 10.0.4 installed on same partition (only one anyway) when I did the 10.1 update install. 25 mins, no hiccups, no errors nothing. It just worked like butter.

Restarted and 10.0.4 was now 10.1 and the only thing changed of my personal settings was thousands of colors intead of millions, and the mouse speed was less than it was before. Oh that and when I started Classic, it asked to change things. No probs there.

I've never had any problems at all with this iMac DV SE 400mhz 256MB RAM (Azenram from FutureShop) from 1999. All OS updates were uneventful, including all OS X updates since the PB. I feel like my computer is the laboratory testbed that never screws up.

I wish everyone an experience like mine.

[cococ]

10.1 has been a nightmare for me. 10.0.X was rock solid on my B/W G3. I very rarely had to do a forced restarted, and only restarted once every 8 days or so, because after 8 days my computer would get extremely sluggish. But until then, speed was not a huge issue for me. Classic was also extremely stable as well. Since my upgrade to 10.1 however, my computer has not been the same. I instantly noticed the speed increase after the update, but eventually all that meant is it took less time for programs to crash on me. Classic now refuses to stay open for long periods of time. It seems whenever I have it open, generally with GoLive or Photoshop running, and leave for a while, upon return I find all classic apps missing from my dock and I have to start it again. IE won't stay open for prolonged periods of time either, it is always quitting on me. I eventually get an error message while trying to open it, and then it quits. I have a screenshot of the error at http://homepage.mac.com/rabidchihuaha/FileSharing1.html It appears to be a carbon problem. Earlier tonight, I was confronted with this error message every time I tried to open a Carbon app. Only a restart fixed this. I'm really getting fed up. While writing this, my Finder quit and relaunched. This is the second time I've notice that happening. I'm very close to doing a reinstall, although I really don't want to.

Edit: I did update OS 9 before updating X

[ 10-11-2001: Message edited by: RABID Chihuaha ]

[parsec]

Well, I seem to have figured out what my problem was.. the system seemed to not like that my external SCSI drive was plugged into my computer but not turned on. I don't like having it on though, because it's bloody loud. BUt at least I seem to have narrowed it down.. hopefully if I unplug it from the scsi port, I'll be able to leave it turned off and still have the system work.
What a bitch. Maybe this will help somebody else one day..

greg

[jabhome]

I believe the answer to all these issues is a clean install. I actually had no problem with the update, and that was after ripping apart the Unix guts, but decided a clean install was for me.

Set-up that worked for me.

OSX on its own partition.
OS9 on its own partition, place user files on OS9 partition as well
Gonna setup up swap, but decided not to bother.

I notice a huge jump in speed on my icebook, and have had absolutely no problems following the clean install. I also installed Fink 0.3.0 which is head and shoulders better than earlier releases, the install process and compilation took under an hour, compared the version 0.2.6 which took approximately 18 hours with 10.0.4.

Just my thoughts,
Jason

[j3kyll]

Originally posted by Arty50:
<STRONG> So I jump in my truck and drive from the Cupertino area all the way down there. </STRONG>

pfft, i just downloaded it off carracho...

[m a d r a]

I don't think you should expect Apple to come up with an installer that is going to work with a heavily modified installation.

changing a couple of configuration files isn't 'heavily modifying' the system. that's what they're there for. the problem is that apple doesn't provide access to these options directly through the installer.

i'm only exercising options which the installer should provide in the first place ie. letting me put my users folders where i want them and choosing which disc to use for VM. [like you could do under classic].

by your terms using the 'scale' effect or changing the dock orientation prior to X,1 would also have been 'heavily modifying the system'.

[dawho9]

I have had this happen to me, and I think it is related to some of the hacks we do.

I have two machines at work.

iMac Rev A - 233/256
G4 Power PCI - 400/1GB

The G4 is nothing fancy for settings. I have installed MYSQL and an updated PHP, but nothing else. I stayed out of the terminal on that machine. It is my Web Server and hence did not want to kill it.

My iMac on the other hand is the machine that I did hack after hack in the terminal. Moved the swap file, hacked the dock, changed priorities on apps, moved my documents folders and all of that stuff.

When I picked up my copy of OSX.1 at my local Apple Store Saturday morning, I went to work and upgraded my WebServer first. No problems at all. Took about 35 minutes...done and back up servering files to the world.

The iMac on the other hand, what a different story. Errors on install, telling to me to restart...losing files, overwritten docs, lost everything.

I really do think it depends on the number of hacks you had on the system. Is this apple's problem or your own, that is really debatable. Its apple's because they were not quick enough to give us options to do the things we needed, it ours because we typed them into the terminal. Just my thought.

dw9

p.s. After a clean install on my iMac, everything was perfect.

[Toyin]

Originally posted by m a d r a:
<STRONG>

changing a couple of configuration files isn't 'heavily modifying' the system. that's what they're there for. the problem is that apple doesn't provide access to these options directly through the installer.

i'm only exercising options which the installer should provide in the first place ie. letting me put my users folders where i want them and choosing which disc to use for VM. [like you could do under classic].

by your terms using the 'scale' effect or changing the dock orientation prior to X,1 would also have been 'heavily modifying the system'.</STRONG>

I'm not a Unix expert by any imagination, but it seems that the changes you made are functionally "heavier" modifications than pinning the dock or changing the minimize effect. These mods are just changing preferences in one application vs changing preferences of the actual system. I don't think comparing the classic VM is fair, because 1) it's not as advanced a system and 2) Moving the VM file is supported by Apple. Once changing the swap file is supported by Apple (which it will be eventually) then I'd blame them.

I would still suggest if you've done any modification to the system that you perform a clean install. This includes newbie modifications like Mac Janitor, Tinker Tool manipulations etc. I can only tell you from my limited modification experience that changing the VM to another hardrive screwed up a simpler update (10.0.3-10.0.4). The upgrade to 10.1 is much more significant.